Reza Alirezaei’s Blog

Quite frankly this subject is a bit tricky and usually highly subjective point of view, so you probably never get a clear answer, unless you spend a considerable amount of time to find out different methodologies and compare them with your needs and start forming your own strategy based on different scenarios. Hereby I also tried to address it from my own perspective and according to my experience. In other words this is what I do in most of my work with technology.

• Rushing blindly into technology, without being fully aware of business needs and conducting more research on real-world business problems instead of more research on the product itself is something that you seriously may want to avoid.
  
  
• Again it varies from one case to another case, but generally speaking I’d prefer to have the implementation to a minimum level of risk from the technology perspective and once achieved, I’ll take a higher level cooperation between technology and business process. I have not invented this approach.It is proven by a lot of ERP vendors and is known to be very effective. .
  
  
• To get more out of your technology investment, the easiest way is to INTEGRATE everything together to have a better understanding on whether you need to apply technology or not. Why having bundles of software and services if you can easily package everything?
  
  
• Always ask yourself questions as follows in advance : 
  
  
  
  
  • Do I have a clear hard look at the Return on Investment (ROI) if I ever decide to bring the technology in-house?
    
  • What is the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) and how it affects your other objectives?
    
    
  • Variety of solutions in the today’s IT market has made most of enterprise environments heterogeneous which means different platforms and that means Maintaining Compatibility (my nightmare;-)) – Is the technology (you are bringing in)  platform dependant or completely neutral?
  
  
  
• Software as a Service (SaaS) or On-demand concept in some cases is a better way to go for. Think ahead to see if you can use the technology as a service with low capital investments and rapid realization of the business benefit.

To wrap it up, I believe that true business value comes through how expertise is delivered, and the way that expertise is delivered is not necessarily diving into the new technology. Watch out not to get trapped by toolsets, utilities and etc, which are notoriously designed to help you to accomplish things better rather than putting you in trouble!

Happy incorporating and good luck with your business